


quick, not hasty

by doublejoint



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:49:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29668242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: Owen fears; Beru sees.
Relationships: Owen Lars/Beru Whitesun
Kudos: 1
Collections: February Ficlet Challenge 2021: Apocalypse No





	quick, not hasty

**Author's Note:**

> For Day 23 of the February Ficlet Challenge: End
> 
> mentions of burial and injury

They are married quickly, but the ceremony is as it would be if they’d planned it. They are in their best clothes; their friends and family are there; they break out the reserves of blue milk cheese and liquor. It is, perhaps, more sedate than it would be otherwise, but perhaps less than it would be later. Cliegg smiles at them; he’s aware enough to know what’s going on, and that’s good enough for Owen, and thus, good enough for Beru. Because they’ll have to watch him overnight, neither of them drinks too much, dances too much, but as Beru’s grandmother used to say, a wedding’s not worth wearing out one’s shoes for.

Neither is the funeral, a week later, when it’s just the two of them at the grave whose headstone is barely grazed by the sand. This time, it is just them; there is no mysterious droid-stealing wizard of a stepbrother or his not-girlfriend, no unexpected recovery of a body wrapped in cloth. They are not spared anything, this time, but they are spared the waves of a stranger’s grief when he does not share their own in the ways they’re used to. 

Their hands are coated in sand. The wind will smooth out the top of the grave again soon. Cliegg is gone, and their names are data in a record book linked together in marriage. Ten days ago Cliegg was here, still reminding Beru about which machines will stall in a heat like today’s, still telling Owen he is too much like his mother, and still visible under all that was Cliegg’s softness, all of him so easily seen. Beru thinks, again, of her grandmother, who had been younger than Cliegg when she’d died but had seemed much older, thinning hair and wrinkled skin, her hands braiding Beru’s hair so that it wound around her head and stayed off her neck.

She touches her temple, her hair braided the same way, now by her own fingers, as fast as her grandmother and her parents. If she and Owen have children, they will not know Beru’s grandmother; they will not know Cliegg or Shmi or Owen’s mother. Of course, Beru has known that already; she has known that long enough, but getting it that close to vocalization hurts. This is not death in the abstract, or the absence of breath, nor is it the physical act of burying a body and the inevitable dream that Beru always has sometime afterwards, of the body rising back up in perfect health and liveliness; this is the spaces that won’t be filled and all the things Beru hadn’t thought to say or to ask, the weight of them at once. 

Owen clasps her hand tighter, the gesture a comfort to both himself and her. At least Cliegg got to see them married, dancing under the low suns; at least he had left them with each other and the farm.

* * *

“Do you regret it?” Owen says.

“Regret what?” says Beru.

Owen’s fork clangs harshly against his plate. Beru tops off her glass of blue milk; she doesn’t need to, but she needs to wait, and she doesn’t want to wait with idle hands.

“Getting married so quickly.”

Beru blinks. She’d been living with Owen’s family for several rotations around the sun. She knows the farm as well as he does; she knows the house better. She had always assumed, and perhaps one should always refrain from assuming but she had anyway, that they would get married eventually, one day; involving the local officials would just be a formality. They didn’t need that to keep each other from straying, from leaving, from thinking this was important.

“Would you never have wanted to?”

“No, I would have. But my father—”

“He wanted to see you married,” says Beru. “We couldn’t have planned a better wedding years in advance. But no, I’m not having any second thoughts. I wouldn’t have said yes if I wasn’t sure.”

“You could have changed your mind,” says Owen, but the heat and worry are receding like the second sun over the horizon in the evening.

Beru covers his hand with hers. His knuckles are dry and cracked, as they always are.

* * *

He is a little more afraid, now that their world is a little smaller. He has never been timid, but Beru can’t hide from it anymore, that he is afraid of what had happened to Shmi, had been so afraid when his father had come back from looking, bruised and bloody with his leg torn off, afraid of that boy taking off through the desert, that boy who had existed as memories and stories, with the same fear in his eyes. If they have children, will Owen fear for them in the same way? She knows the answer already. It would be the same if Cliegg were still here.

Perhaps she fears too little. Their home is remote. There are ordinary dangers, machines short-circuiting, heatstroke and dehydration, sudden illness with no one to care for them, encroaching Tuskens, bandits. There are looming threats whose chances seem infinitesimally small, yet might not matter if the wheel of chance picks them, like offworlders, a distant war, or something even worse. They are alone, yes, but they are alone together, and it’s easier to dream, to believe that one day they’ll have children and droids and farmhands, and they’ll be healthy through it all. To not doubt her choices, unless she has to.

He unbraids her hair, not as quickly as she can do it, but his hands working delicately, like he’s reaching into a machine held together with tiny screws and sharp nails and tangled wires. His hands are steady, though; they feel good against her scalp, when he snags a tangle he’s always quick to ease her hair out of it gently. Never too hasty is he with his doubt, and her without hers. 

And she knows, too, that he does not doubt her--only himself, only the circumstances, only the unknown. Right now, there’s a lot of that.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
